And it is more a reality for us than it
was for our fathers, and much more a reality now than it was a few
centuries ago. The world is more confused and multitudinous than
ever it was, the practicable world far wider, and ourselves far less
under the pressure of inflexible moulding forces and inevitable
necessities than any preceding generations. I want to put very
clearly how I see the new world, the present world, the world of
novel choice to which our youth and inexperience faces, and I want
to define to you a certain selection of choices which I am going to
call aristocratic, and to which it is our manifest duty and destiny
as the elect and favoured sons of our race to direct ourselves.
"It isn't any choice of Hercules I mean, any mere alternative
whether we will be, how shall I put it?--the bridegrooms of pleasure
or the bridegrooms of duty. It is infinitely vaster and more subtly
moral than that. There are a thousand good lives possible, of which
we may have one, lives which are soundly good, or a thousand bad
lives, if you like, lives which are thoroughly bad--that's the old
and perpetual choice, that has always been--but what is more evident
to me and more remarkable and disconcerting is that there are
nowadays ten thousand muddled lives lacking even so much moral
definition, even so much consistency as is necessary for us to call
them either good or bad, there are planless indeterminate lives,
more and more of them, opening out as the possible lives before us,
a perfect wilderness between salvation and damnation, a wilderness
so vast and crowded that at last it seems as though the way to
either hell or heaven would be lost in its interminable futility.
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